


Of Potatoes and Psychological Warfare

by these_dreams_go_on



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, background Bellarke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 02:12:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12422931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/these_dreams_go_on/pseuds/these_dreams_go_on
Summary: Octavia leaves Chewie with Bellamy for the week, his next-door neighbour Lincoln helps the puppy unwittingly wage psychological warfare on him.





	Of Potatoes and Psychological Warfare

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhere in the world and on Tumblr is a dog that brings its owner potatoes when they're sad, except the owner has no potatoes in the house and has no idea where they're coming from. I took that idea and wrote this story from the perspective of the potato supplier.

 

Octavia and Bellamy Blake have a large messy interconnected circle of friends.

Some were hers- Jasper, Monty, Raven, Clarke- and some were his- Miller, Monroe, Harper.

These were the ride-or-die kind of friends, if they got the call in the middle of the night that one of their own was in a hospital, you better believe that they were headed straight for the waiting room and not budging until they got the all clear. They shared clothes, meals, homes. They helped each other move everything from furniture to bodies.

Because Clarke and Miller were emergency responders, not serial killers.

So why the hell Octavia had demanded that Bellamy be the one to look after Chewie was beyond them.

Chewie the Cane Corso puppy had entered their life a year ago, when he had been found abandoned in the park, tied to a tree. Octavia had brought him home, nursed him back to health and the two had been inseparable ever since.

Everyone in the group adored him except Bellamy, who was mildly allergic to both dogs and creatures that made chew toys of his shoes and books.

But Octavia had got into a two-week summer programme at college which was essentially hiking through Yellowstone for credit and had been told that she couldn’t bring the dog because it would be too hot for creature. And Bellamy was the only one with a back yard.

He’d tried to argue that Jasper and Monty would be better for puppy-sitting because they were home all day and would give him plenty of love in between dressing him up for Instagram and the bikers next door might upset him when they revved their engines or played their loud music but she’d only handed him the bag of dog food and told him to suck it up.

Besides, it would be a good excuse for Clarke to frequently drop by, under the pretext of ‘checking up’ on Chewie.

  
**_  
Group Chat: The Delinquents_ **

_8:03 am_

_Bellamy: Did one of you bring a potato into my house?_

_Raven: Is this a dad joke? Are you fried up?_

_Bellamy Blake has added a photo_

_Bellamy: No, it’s a ‘Chewie just fetched me a potato and I have no idea from where’ joke_

_Jasper: Awwww, he brought you a present…good boy!_

_Bellamy: There are no potatoes in my house or yard, where the hell did it come from?!_

_Clarke:  Are you sure it’s a potato?_

_Bellamy: No Griffin, the guy who had to give a conference talk on the Irish potato famine representation in modern British media can’t tell a potato from a tennis ball. Which one is brown and which one is bright green again?_

_Monty: A potato can be bright green if you treat it right._

_Bellamy: For the last time Monty, you and Jasper need to clean out your damn fridge_

_Bellamy: And now’s there another potato!_

_Octavia: Lol, tell Chewie I said he’s a good boy._

 

* * *

 

Bellamy Blake was an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a twenty-six-year-old sex god.

He loved books, refused to even think about buying an e-reader, barely understood social media, preferred staying in to watch documentaries instead of going out and when his friends did manage to force him outside, he was either home by three am or making everyone around him miserable with his grouching.

So, when Clarke comes in his door to hear him swearing up a storm, she panics, thinking he must have injured himself badly- like, hospital, blood transfusions and surgery, badly- to be uttering curse words.

She finds him in the kitchen and nearly injures herself when she doubles over laughing.

  
“Eight!” Bellamy shouts, gesturing wildly, “How the fuck did he find _eight_?!”

  
Chewie woofed happily, tongue lolling and tail wagging as he sat proudly amongst the potatoes.

Clarke finds herself on her knees, her right hand pressed to her stomach as she tries to catch her breath and Chewie bounds over, knocking her onto her back as he leans against her for pats.

  
“This, is the best thing I’ve ever seen!” she manages to gasp eventually, assuming that Bellamy's lack of response was due to his attempt to keep a fragile hold on his sanity and not because from where he was standing, he could see right down Clarke's shirt.

* * *

 

Lincoln wasn’t really a fan of gardening.

He could do the basics, he mowed his lawn, trimmed the tree in his backyard so it didn’t hang over into the neighbours’ properties and could keep his houseplants alive.

But growing fruits, vegetables or flowers? More trouble than it was worth.

Which was why he’d been annoyed when his cousin Luna had come to stay and insisted he should try growing his own organic produce.

She’d thought she could convert him by going ahead and planting the seeds while he was at work, but he’d spotted her preparing the soil the night before and waited until she’d gone for her evening run before sneaking out with salt from the pantry, sprinkling it over the patches so nothing would grow.

He’d almost been successful as well.

Except for the damn potato plants.

Not only had they survived his neglect, his dumping hot water on them and then a light spray of WD-40- the only toxic thing he’d had on hand at the time- but they had actually reached their harvest season intact.

And this was bad news, because if Luna found out that one plant could grow in his backyard, she’d do her damn best to turn him into an amateur farmer.

So, when he heard scruffling early one morning, and came out to find a giant dog digging into his potato patch, his only concern had been for the creature.

  
“Hey buddy,” he crooned, crouching down and holding out a hand, “You’re not lost, are you?”

  
The dog had raised its head, bounded over to knock him onto his ass and sniff him enthusiastically before going back to his digging.

He emerged with a potato in his mouth and Lincoln is smiling encouragingly as the puppy shook his head vigorously until it was free of the plant and he pads over to the fence, where Lincoln saw a hole had been dug.

Well, really, he couldn’t have stopped him even if he had wanted to.

He stretches up onto his toes to look over the fence and watches the dog head into his neighbour’s house, clearly vacationing there, obviously not lost and he heads inside to start his day.

The dog, who according to his bright pink name tag, was called Chewie, visited him twice a day, usually when his neighbour was at work and Lincoln guessed by the shouts of frustration and confusion that the dog-sitter had absolutely no idea where the potatoes were coming from.

If it were anyone else, Lincoln might have been disposed to knock on his door and explain but, even though he’d never officially met his neighbour, he didn’t like the guy.

  
Shortly after he’d moved in, Lincoln had had the police around about a noise complaint, and yeah, Nyko and his friends had their motorcycles parked on his front lawn, having a boozy cook-out pretty close to midnight, but they were the local chapter for BACA and had just finished a long protection stint only three blocks over.

Thing was, if the neighbour had just asked him, he would have told Nyko to keep it quiet.

And yeah, he knows knocking on the door of a guy with a yard full of bikers could be a little scary, but the second strike against the neighbour came from the noises he heard after six pm.

And no, not sex noises, Lincoln could ignore those, but the media noises.

Specifically, the documentaries that for the last six months had been almost exclusively world war two, holocaust and Nazi focused.

And Lincoln knew one thing for certain, only two kinds of people watched those kinds of documentaries in large quantity- historians or weirdoes.

His neighbour was tilting towards the weirdo end of the spectrum, not full blown ‘this was what liberals meant when they argued for mental health background checks’ but close to ‘would not be surprised if he eventually served time in the military or a federal prison’

So, if a rapidly growing dog wanted to dig up Luna’s potatoes and wage psychological warfare on his neighbour, Lincoln wasn’t going to stop him.

In fact, one afternoon he came home from the store with milk-bones to encourage the puppy.

* * *

 

He liked to have his front and back door open during the day, after all, anyone brave enough to rob him isn’t going to be deterred by a locked door and he liked the fresh air. So, he’s not surprised when he wakes up to find Chewie wandering into his bedroom.

  
“Morning, buddy,” he croaks, his voice heavy with sleep, and he flops a hand over the bed, to be head-butted and licked before the dog clambers over the sheets, marking them with dirty paw-prints.

“What’s the matter?” he asks, not expecting a response but Chewie flops onto his belly, looking mournful as he contemplates the pillow and Lincoln has a moment where he worries his next-door neighbour might have died in the night.

  
Except his neighbour locked up the house every night, so more likely, Chewie’s issues were on his side of the fence.

  
“Am I out of potatoes?” he asks, climbing out of bed and pulling on a pair of boxers, heading to the backyard to see the remains of the veggie patch.

  
From what he could see from the three-foot distance he refused to close between himself and Luna’s hobby, he was potato free.

He personally thinks this is a good thing, but Chewie is pawing the ground, whimpering with disappointment and Lincoln can actually hear his heart breaking.

  
“Okay, buddy,” He bends down and scratches his ear, “How do you feel about non-organic potatoes?”

  
There’s a fresh produce market a few blocks over and he tells himself that he had been planning to stock up anyway as a subtle sign to Luna that he was never going to grow his own food, so really, the ten-kilo bag of spuds he lugs into his house has more than one purpose.

Chewie woofs happily as Lincoln throws the purple vegetables into the yard, jumping into the air to catch one in his mouth and not ten minutes later, he’s chuckling to himself as he hears his neighbour’s scream.

  
_“They’ve changed colour!”_

__

* * *

 

Honestly, he’s surprised that nobody figured it out sooner.

He comes home one day- and thirty potatoes later- to find Chewie sitting on his front porch with a young woman wearing hiking gear with tanned skin but a sunburnt nose.

  
“Hi,” she greets, pushing herself up, a long ponytail swinging behind her,

“Um…has my dog been stealing your potatoes?”

  
Part of him wants to deny it, because he heard his neighbour watching The Man in the High Castle last night and he’s beginning to worry, but Chewie pads over and flops onto his back, paws high in the air and tongue lolling out.

  
“I wouldn’t say stealing,” Lincoln protests, trying to fight the grin creeping across his face, “Just…enthusiastically gardening?”

  
Chewie squirms on his back, wriggling his whole body and kicking his leg enthusiastically as Lincoln rubs his belly with his boot.

  
The woman watches them both with an arched eyebrow, “Well this enthusiastic gardening has been driving my brother crazy, I found him going through the house looking for a secret cache of potatoes, positive our friends were sneaking them in for Chewie.”

Lincoln chuckles, “I think that says more about your friends than it does about me.”

He holds out his hand, “Lincoln Woods.”

She takes it with a grin and a firm shake, “Octavia Blake.”

“How’d you figure it out?” he asks, opening his front door and stepping out of the way as Chewie pads inside, Octavia following after a quick glance in his direction.

“Well, I knew our friends weren’t stupid enough to piss Bellamy- my brother- off this badly,” she begins, laughing as she sees Chewie walk into the open pantry and re-emerge with a potato in his mouth, “Not when he’s the only one guaranteed to come bail them out of jail on a Sunday morning. So, I guessed he was getting them from one of the neighbours and you were the best bet.”

The two of them amble out to the yard to see Chewie disappearing under the hole in the fence and Lincoln tries to think of how to keep Octavia around.

  
“What about the guy on the other side of the fence?” he suggests and she snorts, crossing her arms over her chest,

“Oh, you mean Wallace? Guessing you haven’t met the guy then?”

He shakes his head, “Not a fan?”

  
He doubles back to the kitchen and offers her tea, secretly thrilled when she says yes and hops up on his kitchen stool. She elaborates on her issues with his neighbours two doors up, that her brother was a historian, not a burgeoning serial killer, although apparently the potatoes had been driving him dangerously insane. He also learns that she’s house-sitting for her brother next week while he’s at a conference.

He doesn’t learn if she’s single but when she notes that he uses a kettle to make tea, he blatantly lies about Luna- who he emphasises his cousin- giving it to him as a present after his last girlfriend had to move overseas for work.

They’re on their second cup of tea and chatting about her hike when her brother comes looking for her because they’re meant to be somewhere. And big brother glares at him the entire time Octavia is introducing them and Lincoln can’t resist holding his hand out to Chewie, who immediately sits down and offers his paw to shake.

It’s a toss-up as to which of them Bellamy Blake dislikes more.

At least until the day after he’s left for the conference, when Octavia comes around for a cup of tea which sits cold and forgotten as Lincoln spreads her across his sheets and they stay there for hours until Chewie comes barging into the bedroom, potato in his mouth.

  
“Okay,” he groans as she slowly pushes herself up onto her elbows, “I have to ask, why potatoes?”

Octavia laughs, “Not a clue.”

* * *

 

Bellamy gives a lovely speech at their wedding, about how Lincoln has become like a brother to him, how happy he is that Octavia fell in love with such a good man…

Lincoln almost feels guilty that he’d insisted on having his new brother-in-law served an entrée of potato gratin.

Almost.


End file.
